Francis Fukuyama discusses public ideas with Joe Walker

Francis Fukuyama discusses the future of liberal democracy, dampening far-out ideas about the transformative powers of artificial intelligence.

Joe Walker has an interview with Francis Fukuyama (80 minutes) which he has titled AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] and the recommencement of history.

It starts not with artificial intelligence, but with questions about biotechnology and longevity, drawing attention to the social costs of extending human life. Fukuyama believes that in the long run our capacity to manipulate organic life forms may be more consequential than the influence of AI. That leads to questions about rights and class in stratified societies, where stratification may have been designed by a technological aristocracy rather than through assortative mating. (Think about the ideas of Aldous Huxley, Thomas Schelling and Elon Musk coming together to shape our genetic composition.)

The last part of the conversation is more down to earth about the future of work (it’s not going away) and theories of bureaucracy.

A recurrent theme in the discussion is about the future of liberal democracy, a topic that runs through Fukuyama’s writings. In this discussion Walker and Fukuyama discuss it in the context of the influence of AI.

Fukuyama is inclined to dampen the hype about AI and its consequences. He freely admits that he cannot predict its consequences: think about how wrong Thomas Edison would have been had someone asked him to predict the consequences of electricity, Fukuyama suggests. But he comes back to the essential, if indescribable, properties that describe humanity. Humans cannot be replicated.

Towards the end he explains his cautious aversion to making far-out predictions, where he describes the pressures on public intellectuals:

I think that one of the big pitfalls of certain public intellectuals is that they have a big success, they get this big dopamine hit early on in their careers and they then constantly want to replicate it. And so they are forced to then take positions that are more and more extreme and ridiculous.